In recent years, small-sized electric apparatuses with imaging functions, typified by a digital still camera and a digital video camera, have become popular, and the imaging functions have been made more sophisticated.
For example, these imaging apparatuses usually include a display such as an LCD which allows users to check an image to be recorded on the display and capture an image of the object. At present, in the areas of digital still cameras and digital video cameras, some imaging apparatuses may detect a face of a person and automatically focus on the detected face (autofocus (AF)) or automatically adjust exposure according to the detected face (automatic exposure (AE)), and some may measure a smile on a detected face and control the shutter.
However, it is difficult for such imaging apparatuses to select a face to use as a basis for such control when more than one face is detected. In some cases, control of the processes such as AF and AE may be performed on the basis of an object unintended by a user. On the other hand, some imaging apparatuses allow a user to select a person and register the person's face in advance of shooting, and thereby detect only a specific person (the person of the registered face image), and some track a human or a non-human object selected by a user and control AF or AE adaptively to the tracking.
In one of the conventional techniques which allow a user to select a human or a non-human tracking object, the user specifies a region including an image of a tracking object by hand (for example, by giving a touch to the region in which a tracking object is present on a touchscreen), and an object having color features extracted from the specified region is tracked (see Patent Reference 1). In another one of the conventional techniques, an imaging apparatus detects candidate tracking objects in a picture, and selects one of them to set the selected one as a tracking object (see Patent Reference 2).
FIG. 21 shows a block diagram of the conventional technique disclosed in Patent Reference 1.
A method of processing 9A shown in FIG. 21 is one of the conventional techniques.